Desert Cut

by Betty Webb

  A slight narrowing of his eyes. “What makes you think we already know?”

  From the tension in this room, I started to say, but stopped myself just in time. “I’m an ex-cop, remember?”

  “Very ex. You left the job years ago.”

  Recognizing the stall, I took evasive action. “Okay. What’s the medical examiner’s name? If you don’t tell me, I’ll just call my office and find out.”

  “From that Pima Indian partner of yours.”

  At least the sheriff’s background check had been thorough. “That’s right. Give my partner a computer and before you can say ‘somebody’s keeping a secret,’ he’ll have your mother’s maiden name and the day and time she first kissed your father.”

  Avery glowered, then appeared to change his mind. “The M.E.’s name is Dr. Nelson Lanphear. Now like I said, please go away.”

  “Is he at the hospital now?”

  “You think he gives me his schedule?” Without another word, the sheriff closed his office door. At least he didn’t slam it.

  The deputies suddenly found business that needed attending to, so amid a great rustling of paperwork, I left.

  Outside, the sun blazed down as if it wanted to bring back summer. I found Warren under the shade of a gnarled mesquite, studying the street with a worried expression. “We need to get the hell out of Dodge, Lena. These people look like something out of a Wes Craven movie.”

  Since I’d spent several pleasant weekends in Los Perdidos in the past, his comment surprised me. Los Perdidos residents tended to be friendly and hardly resemble characters in a slasher film. Yet when I looked around, I saw the reason for Warren’s concern. On the corner, a group of men stood watching us, their body language as tense as that of the sheriff and his deputies. At the other end of the street, another group huddled together in a tense knot, glaring at Warren as if he had just insulted their sisters.

  “You’re right. Something’s going on.”

  He turned away from their glares and looked longingly at the Mercedes. “An astute observation. Can we leave now?”

  I wanted to, but the memory of the girl’s face wouldn’t let me. “Not yet.”

  ***

  Our stop at the hospital turned out to be a waste of time. Probably built by the same architect who had slapped together the city center’s government complex, its facade was even less welcoming than most medical buildings. The only decorative touch was the bronze plaque by the front door that proclaimed: DONATED BY LEE CASEY IN LOVING MEMORY OF CAROLINE SOMERS CASEY.

  Once inside, the stark interior mirrored the building’s exterior, and the acrid scent of Lysol wafted along unadorned hallways painted the color of spoiled milk. In a glass booth overseeing a mostly-empty waiting room, a faded redhead informed us that today was Dr. Lanphear’s day off. She added that she was swamped with work, so if neither of us was sick or injured, let her get to it. Studiously ignoring us, she began leafing through a small stack of insurance forms.

  Baffled by the obvious brush-off, we returned to the car.

  “This is crazy, Lena,” Warren said. “That child’s dead, just another victim of this mess we call a border.”

  By now, my sorrow had hardened into determination. “I feel like a drink, how about you?”

  “Are you serious?” Warren had been in a Twelve Step program for years.

  Not knowing who my parents were and fearing what kind of genetic load I might be carrying, I didn’t drink, either. “Let’s find a bar. The closer to the hospital, the better.”

  “For God’s sake, why?”

  “People talk in bars,” I explained. “Especially when they’ve been there for a while. If you’re too tired, I can drive.”

  He slid into the driver’s seat. “One bar, coming up.”

  A few minutes later we were hunkered over Cokes at the Geronimo Lounge, which appeared even seedier on the inside than it had from the curb. Even though Arizona had passed a stringent No Smoking law, a fog of smoke and stale beer assaulted my nostrils. Someone had started to paint the cement floor a swampy green, then gave up halfway through. Moths had attacked the stuffed antelope head mounted above the cash register, and the glass had long been cracked on the large photograph of a genial-appearing Geronimo—wearing a top hat, no less—that hung on the rear wall. A damaged speaker on the juke box hissed its way through the end of a George Strait tune, then began crucifying the Rolling Stones. Still shy of ten a.m., the lounge held few customers, but the drinkers slumped over the long, scarred bar looked like they’d been exercising their elbows since sunup.

  Perfect.

  I found my prey, an elderly man sitting alone at a table by the men’s room, his nose almost as red as the Budweiser sign on the wall behind him. By his right hand, a copy of the Cochise County Observer lay open to a half-finished crossword puzzle. He sipped slowly on his Molson’s as if trying to make it last.

  I walked up to the bar, ordered a bottle of Molson’s, and took it over to his table. “Happy Birthday.”

  His looked up, his eyes clear. “Not my birthday, Blondie.”

  “It will be eventually.”

  “Good one. What do you want? Woman looks like you, she doesn’t need to go around picking up geezers like me. Especially not with that flashy boyfriend of yours sitting over there. Or are you recruiting for some weirded-out threesome?”

  I smiled. “That’s a good one, too.”

  His grin revealed a mouth full of cheap dentures. “I wasn’t always this old, Blondie.”

  “Don’t be naughty. I just want to ask you some questions.”

  “That’ll cost you another Molson’s.”

  Hearing this, Warren fetched a bottle, then resumed his seat, making it clear he wanted nothing to do with either of us. I waited until the old man took another sip, then asked, “You hear about that little girl found dead in the Dragoons?”

  He studied the label on his beer bottle. “Who the hell hasn’t?”

  “You being a local, I figure you might know where she is now.”

  “She ain’t playing hopscotch, that’s for sure.” When I drew his new Molson’s away, he added, “She’s in that basement cooler room over at the hospital.”

  I shoved the beer toward him again. “They do the autopsy yet?”

  “Soon’s they brought her in, is what I hear.” He placed a hand around each beer bottle. “Get me another Molson’s.”

  Warren brought over two more, his face stiff with disapproval.

  “I only drink in here once a week,” the old man explained. “On Sundays.”

  “Today’s Saturday.”

  “Yeah, well, some weeks are worse than others.” With his stooped back and age-spotted skin, he probably hadn’t seen a good week in years.

  I leaned forward, making certain my next question didn’t carry to the bar. “Do you know the cause of death?”

  “What makes you think I might?”

  “An educated guess. You work crossword puzzles, which means you pay attention to things.”

  “You some kind of Sherlock Holmes?”

  “Kind of.” I took my Private Investigator’s I.D. out of my pocket and flashed it at him.

  “Lena Jones, girl detective. Ha! You working this case?”

  Case. His choice of words told me I was on the right track. “I’m not sure yet, which is why I need to know cause of death.”

  He picked up his beer, chugged it, then opened a new one. Halfway through that, he belched, then chugged some more. Just as I was about to take away the other bottles, he said in a voice as low as mine, “She bled out. The assistant to the medical examiner’s my nephew. He told his ex-wife, who told my sister, who told me and anyone else who would listen.”

  “Bled out from what?”

  A subtle chorus of sounds from the bar, as if several drinkers had shifted on their bar stools at the same time. Apparently our voices weren’t low enough.

  My informant started to speak, stopped, then started again. “Ah, hell. The kid got
cut up by some kind of sex killer. My sister said it was bad, real bad. Everybody’s scared their kid’s going to be next. Now, thanks for all the beer, but I need another one. I’m not drunk enough yet.”

  I fetched him a fresh Molson’s and headed toward the door, where Warren waited, his Coke abandoned on the barroom table.

  Some kind of sex killer.

  Killed, mutilated, dumped like garbage in the barren waste of the Dragoon Mountains.

  Sheriff Avery was wrong.

  Whoever had done it didn’t give a damn about her.

  Chapter Three

  Monday morning, after seeing Warren off to the relative safety of Beverly Hills, where only spouses sliced and diced each other, I sat in my Scottsdale office attempting to work away my grief.

  For a while, the phones cooperated, conveying tales of one betrayed relationship after another. Desert Investigations is always happy to check out potential mates to make certain they aren’t stalkers, serial killers, or mere garden-variety frauds, but we seldom take divorce cases. The bitterness that arises during a marriage’s end stage between two people who once loved each other is not uplifting.

  I stared through the big picture window as a caller confided his suspicion that his twenty-two-years-younger wife was having an affair with her personal trainer. Outside on Main Street, the sun shone down on a herd of tourists roaming from one art gallery to another. Some wore sandals and Bermuda shorts, others, East Coast wool. The shorts crowd displayed goose bumps (it was little more than seventy degrees out there), the wool crowd sweated. Only we residents ever got Scottsdale weather right.

  “She says she received those marks on her neck from the Nautilus machine but I know a hickey when I see one,” the caller continued in an irritating whine.

  I tore my eyes away from a woman too old to be wearing the hot pants she so proudly sported, and stared at the phone. “Hickey, did you say?”

  “Haven’t you been listening?”

  Not really, since I had heard it all before. “Mr. Gustafson, Desert Investigations doesn’t handle divorce cases.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted to divorce her. I just want to know.”

  “Then you need a marriage counselor, not a detective.” I gave him the name of a therapist I worked with, and over his protests, hung up.

  By ten, with the tide of unfaithfulness about to drown me, I begged my partner for help. “Would you take some of these calls? There’s a run on cheaters today.”

  Jimmy Sisiwan, a Pima Indian who lived on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Reservation at the eastern edge of Scottsdale, glanced up from his computer where he was running pre-employment checks for Southwest MicroSystems. The curved tribal tatoo on his forehead glistened against his mahogany skin. “Sorry, but I have my own problems over here. Looks like the front-runner for Marketing Director might have a history of domestic abuse.”

  Might have, which meant Jimmy wasn’t certain yet. “Why would that matter to MicroSystems? They’re in business to make money, and money doesn’t have a conscience. At least, not the last time I checked.”

  He gave me a confident smile. “Their new vice president in charge of security is a woman. Divorced. She’s taken out an order of protection against her ex.”

  It didn’t amaze me that powerful women sometimes married creepy men, but Jimmy’s naiveté did. Regardless of their own marital woes, women could be just as hard-nosed in business as the opposite sex, which meant that the applicant might get the job even if he regularly beat his wife to a pulp.

  Deciding to let voice mail take my calls for a while, I picked up the morning newspaper. After sifting through front-page stories about marketplace suicide bombings in the Middle East, I thumbed to the Local section were the news wasn’t much better: a drive-by shooting near Phoenix Children’s Hospital, jewelry store robbery in Peoria, and the discovery of a drop house in north Scottsdale crammed with thirty-four undocumented aliens, three of them dead. Then, on the second-to-last page of the section, a headline over a young girl’s photograph asked: DO YOU KNOW ME?

  Those very words had once appeared over a picture of me at age four, and no one had ever responded. Today, instead of my own face, I saw the child from the Dragoons. The photographer had been kind. She no longer looked dead, just sleeping.

  I must have made a noise, because Jimmy turned from his keyboard and asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “This girl in the paper. She’s the one I found.”

  He rose from his seat and walked over to my desk. Picking up the newspaper, he read aloud, “The Cochise County Sheriff’s Office is asking for the public’s help in identifying a young girl found dead in the Dragoon Mountains last weekend. Dubbed ‘Precious Doe’ by the medical examiner, the child is African-American, between five and seven years old. Wounds on her body suggest she was the victim of a crime. Anyone with information about this girl is urged to contact Sheriff Bill Avery’s office at 520-555-3215.”

  Jimmy lowered the newspaper with a look in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. “Sure was a pretty little thing, wasn’t she?”

  Was. That horrible past tense. God only knew what a few days in cold storage had done to her.

  “I’m sure the sheriff will track her identity down, along with whoever did…Well, did what they did.” His tone wasn’t as confident as his words. We both knew that bodies dumped in the Arizona desert were seldom identified, their killers remaining free to kill again.

  When I didn’t respond, he said, “Lena, you shouldn’t take everything so personal.” An orphan himself, he knew all about my childhood, my nightmares.

  Before I could remind him that I always took abused children personal, the phone rang. This time I picked it up before the voice mail did. I didn’t care what kind of sad story was on the line, it would be better than the one in my head.

  Desert Investigations has been in business ever since a bullet in the hip ended my career with the Scottsdale Police Department. Jimmy, introduced to me by a man whose son I had once freed from prison, joined me as full partner soon afterward. His Internet skills and my television consulting kept us flush enough to accept more pro bono cases than the average investigative agency usually took, but truth be told, we preferred those. Neither of us liked spending our time ferreting out run-of-the-mill liars and cheaters.

  The office is relatively decent, as P.I. offices go, mainly because of our downtown Scottsdale location and the expectations of our clientele. None of that old Maltese Falcon grimness here, just coffee-colored walls hung with civic commendations, two tasteful blond desks with a row of matching filing cabinets, and several Western-patterned chairs scattered throughout the reception area. Comfortable and anonymous. When clients visit P.I.s, they’re not shopping for decorating tips.

  The day dragged on, broken up only by more paranoid spouses, and a few parents begging me to drug-test their teens. I grew so bored that by the time we closed, even the tourist parade had ceased being entertaining.

  “Ready for some cappuccino at Java Joe’s?” I asked, as we locked up. The art galleries were closing, too, expelling tourists onto the sidewalk, where they just stood around, wondering what to do next. Cajun fritters at Sugar Daddy’s? Jose Cuervo at the Rusty Spur?

  Jimmy didn’t answer right away, but when he did, he sounded uncomfortable. “Ah, cappuccino sounds great, Lena, but I need to rush home and shower. I have an, um, appointment, kind of, tonight.” A hint of pink began to spread across his cheeks, which was in itself strange, since Indians almost never blushed.

  Such embarrassment could only mean one thing; my partner had a date. “Is she anyone I know?”

  His eyes shifted away, something else that seemed strange, because he was usually the most open of men. “I doubt it.”

  Jimmy’s love life tended to be as disastrous as mine. Among his former girlfriends were a convicted felon who’d sold him a stolen Rolex; a refugee from an upstate polygamy compound who tried to make a white man out of him; a bartender who drank more Tecate than s
he served. The list goes on. Always a sucker for a sob story, he had been used and abused by the supposedly weaker sex ever since we’d known each other.

  As we stood on the sidewalk, tourists swarmed around us, every now and then one of them throwing Jimmy an expression of alarm. Like most Pimas, he was a big man, and his tribal tattoo made him appear fierce. Ignoring the tourists, I framed my next question cautiously. “You’ve known her for a while?”

  A sheepish smile. “Isn’t that what dates are for, to get to know someone?” This from a man whose job was dragging skeletons out of closets.

  The worry-wart in me refused to let it go. Faking a conversational tone, I asked, “Where’d you meet her?”

  “What, you’re my mother, now? I already have two. Had, anyway.”

  Jimmy’s biological mother, a full-blooded Pima, died of the tribal scourge of diabetes when he was a baby. Several years later, his father died of the same disease. His white Mormon adoptive parents lived in Utah, but they had kept in close touch since Jimmy had returned to the reservation to reclaim his cultural roots. The Mormons had raised him to be polite, even when dealing with snoops like me.

  He sighed. “I’m sorry if I sounded rude, Lena. I know you care, but I’m a big boy and can take care of myself. Just to set your mind at rest, I met her at last week’s pow-wow.”

  I relaxed. Most members of the tribe had their act together, so his big heart might have lucked out this time. “She’s Pima?”

  “Anglo, but she came with a Pima friend. We danced. We talked. We made a date. Okay?”

  With that, we said good night and went our separate ways, Jimmy to seek love, and me to my lonely apartment above the office.

  At one time my two-room-plus-kitchen-and-bath had been a study in beige, but earlier this year, after deciding to put down some roots of my own, I’d tricked it out in neo-Cowgirl. All that beige-ness was now buried beneath bright Navajo rugs, a saguaro-rib sofa and chair, a red Lone Ranger and Tonto bedspread, and turquoise-shaded lamps with bases shaped like horse heads.

  But I’m not a purist. Although it interfered with the ambience, I still kept the “Welcome to the Philippines” toss pillow I’d stolen from one of my foster parents, either the fourth or the fifth. There were so many, I’ve lost track.